Poems by Keith Nunes

APPASSIONATA

He wakes to clouds fastened to the sky,
Something inside his head is keening like a lovelorn narwhal,
He shaves, everywhere,

Kneeling, his hands in kid-gloves, touching her naked body as
she stands in high heels, back to the front door
‘He never touches my soul’ 

Morning bird-song collapses into a mourning dirge,
She’s quavering under the piano, drinking Finlandia from the bottle,
He runs Beethoven’s Für Elise over the keys,
“You wretch! Why that piece!” she shouts,
“Equivocator! You said I was forgiven.”

The renowned portrait artist waits wrathfully,
beside his easel, for
his silly-rich subjects to settle


GORKY 

Arshile Gorky
paints from
inside the Peculiar,
Triumphantly!
He paints the word
bravado without a say-so,
Trauma is spelt with
a flourish
registers as a B flat,
The titular character
in his oil-on-canvas novella
is pawned off,
You can see him mashed & draped
resembling a trampled
Chagall perpetrator
&
Maxim Gorky,
writing in the shadow
of the gulag,
‘To paint is to bear a child,
To write is to raise the child’
Once he bled Tolstoy blood
On Moscow snow,
Now there’s only blood in his eyes,
He looks up,
‘Is it a sign?’ says his muse,
‘I can’t see where it wants me to go’ says Alexei Maximovich,

The GORKYS,
Once were cousins,
But never again